I don't have any idea how they process it, but the hospice workers did seem well adjusted. Maybe it's because there was a good (for Lincoln) Italian restaurant across the street?
Also, we've been having a pretty normal summer here. It gets hot sometimes, but rarely over 90. And the mornings are cool.
Parenting in the time of the (likely very short-lived) Anthropocene is among the worst parts. Raising realists that aren't consumed by nihilism and/or rage while also equipping them with the tools useful for survival in the coming century? Oof.
I've made my peace with my likely demise in the salt mines of God Emperor Desantis or whoever, but I need to imagine a better possible future for my children.
For parenting, I try to tell them that they'll be part of a large extended group of people who are fighting to save the environment, and who are already cooperating and strategizing on how to do it, to try to ease the "I've got to solve littering TODAY BY MYSELF!" urge that possesses our kids when we walk by trash or talk about the environment. (Not that they shouldn't pick up litter as they go; just trying to help them process.)
They're pretty stressed out about it, though. Or at least 0.5-0.75 of them are.
A lot of the more experienced people at my Zen temple work in hospice, and it seems like that understanding of suffering and impermanence gives them a way to go forward with needful work without falling back on false consolation. I've heard them say there's an inner nobility in just about everyone they care for, and the starkness of the end-of-life period brings out that nobility more clearly (alongside the more grueling and humiliating aspects of dying), because there's no time left for unimportant matters.
I'm not sure what all they would say if I asked them about climate, but "am I complicit?" is surely the wrong question because we can't help being complicit and "do no harm" is impossible. That still leaves space for action?
3-4: My son has advised me once my generation is dead, his generation will be able to sort it out.
For my part, I do what I can to ensure that my kids are economically viable and maybe even able to purchase real estate on high ground.
I think this is an unnecessarily gloomy take, and one which, perversely, tends to discourage people from actually taking action.
The human race is not going to destroy itself through anthropogenic climate change. It isn't even going to destroy human civilisation through anthropogenic climate change. No one serious believes this, and no one who wants to be taken seriously should say they believe this. Hospice analogies should be doubly banned.
The outlook is not great! We are, pretty much inevitably, going to see at least 1.5 degrees of warming and probably 2 degrees. This will mean a lot of avoidable human suffering, and hundreds of billions of dollars worth of avoidable damage.
But the decarbonisation of the world is going much faster than anyone expected. One example: every year the IEA estimates how much new solar capacity will be installed each year in the future, and every year since 2006 it has been colossally wrong. https://zenmo.com/en/photovoltaic-growth-reality-versus-projections-of-the-international-energy-agency-with-2018-update-2/
Climate change is inevitable and it will be bad - but actions taken over the next ten, 20, 30 and 50 years will have significant influence on how bad.
Here's Rebecca Solnit:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jul/26/we-cant-afford-to-be-climate-doomers
The human race is not going to destroy itself through anthropogenic climate change.
I'm not emotionally attached to the survival of the species itself, so much as the quality of life of its most vulnerable members. I'm mourning the exact things you describe in the rest of 7 - "a lot of avoidable human suffering, and hundreds of billions of dollars worth of avoidable damage". Plus a lot of extinctions!
I do take your point that despair leads to inaction. I really struggle with this, because the literal facts on the ground, without exaggeration, are despair-worthy and we still have time to pick the 3rd-worst-path instead of the 1st-worst-path, which is a meaningful difference, but also no one would be faulted for observing how the past 40 years of environmental activism has gone and being pessimistic about the pattern.
Is the glass one-quarter full, or three-quarters empty?
I think you need to make a difference between gloom and despair - gloom is entirely understandable, despair, in the literal sense of hopelessness (desespoir) is not. The facts on the ground are gloomy but they are anything but despair-worthy - we have moved, in the last ten years, in a way that makes the IPCC "business as usual" scenario now incredibly unlikely.
The last 40 years of environmental activism have been amazingly successful! They just haven't achieved all their aims. But they've achieved really substantial reductions in per capita emissions in every advanced country (not to mention all the non-climate successes like clean air, clean water, ozone restoration, acid rain abatement and so on). Say not the struggle naught availeth, etc.
Is the glass one-quarter full, or three-quarters empty?
Doesn't matter. What matters is that the glass is being filled.
The best counter to anxiety is action, yes, and am grateful to have had the opportunity to do some career development in the direction of meaningful action: viz. getting qualified as a Passivhaus Certified Designer. And now spend a lot of time in simple repetition: asking every colleague - and everyone I encounter in development - to focus on low energy design. This should ease the transition to decarbonisation, since there will be much call on renewable generation for a while.
Will the world end? Well, to consider one aspect of the threat: agriculture looks precarious, since weather patterns now look precarious. In theory, 'the market' can respond, but you might decide to plant n hectares with crop c, only to never receive enough rain. Or to receive too much rain. If agriculture is precarious, then the staggeringly huge human population is precarious, and maybe we go from eight billion to four billion in short order, and it's terrible, with wars and the rest. But I can't see a sensible way to make predictions here: can anyone?
If you cannot make predictions, yet at the same time you know that the threat is severe, then I think you just have to assume that change is mandatory and carry it out, using the best practice available?
Incidentally, the first Passivhaus - in a sense - was Canadian, so well done Canadians: https://passivehouseplus.ie/blogs/the-saskatchewan-house-1977
And I suppose I've just expressed the precautionary principle. I guess I would just stress that precautionary principle has two parts: there's the appreciation of risk, and then there's the human response to that risk. And the response here has to be seen in terms of us not being negligent.
Recently I've been coming to view the climate change catastrophe era in a similar light as World War II. That is, it will be miserable and lead to a ton of undue death and suffering, but it will also be eminently survivable civilizationally, and it does not mark the start of an irreversible decline.
15: I made that exact analogy and then deleted it because I'd just been railing against analogies... but yes. I'd be gloomy if I was in 1943, because I'd be at war and in danger, but I wouldn't be despairing.
I tend to take refuge in a kind of detached nihilism about things like this. We're all doomed, but it's OK because it never really mattered to anything except maybe ourselves to begin with, but we may still be able to have fun and appreciate the little things in life in the meantime. I'd trace this attitude to encountering The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy at a formative age, if anything. I'm not sure if this is functionally different from despair in terms of motivating me to take action or not, but I think it's better for my mood, at least.
When talking about big-picture stuff with Cassandane, I take comfort in the fact that I have family with extra living space in Vermont. I don't enjoy living there but it's easy to imagine climate change making our current home unlivable, or Cassandane's parent's home. It's hard to imagine that in Vermont. (At worst, the roads get washed out in flooding, but that's small potatoes compared to wildfires in CA or significant sea level change where I am.)
The last 40 years of environmental activism have been amazingly successful! They just haven't achieved all their aims. But they've achieved really substantial reductions in per capita emissions in every advanced country (not to mention all the non-climate successes like clean air, clean water, ozone restoration, acid rain abatement and so on). Say not the struggle naught availeth, etc.
This leads me to a moment of insight. Unconsciously, I've adopted the following as one of my measures of success: "how does climate change show up in the conversations that ordinary people have?" In other words, the level of universality that recycling has achieved. I'm not claiming recycling itself is a success - I don't know how to measure that - but it's incorporated into everyday life.
It's good to remember that we can make progress on climate change without needing that kind of mundane, daily buy-in from the vast majority of people. But still, the mass indifference that I see is a big source of my anxiety. Or rather, the indifference that kicks in the moment you try to alter the status quo.
15/16: Do you guys think that we're at 1943 in the climate change battle, so to speak? Not way earlier?
The end of the beginning.
19: I had a thought that maybe the Maui fire is analogous to Pearl Harbor, and then I thought, "This is why there is an analogy ban."
The Oahu fires of 2026 will be the analog of Pearl Harbor.
The WWII analogy doesn't work for me. Opposing an external enemy is -- psychologically and strategically -- a much simpler problem than remaking the system that you yourself live in, and which makes possible the things you know and love and depend upon. And anyway, civilizations did die out in WWII, and whole worlds did end.
Apparently, because of changes in weapons and construction, a nuclear war is not likely to produce a nuclear winter. So the easy way out is gone.
Does anyone know how reliable PRC electricity generating statistics are? They're reporting huge amounts of solar + offshore wind added in the last year, would be interested to know how reality-based that is.
Inside the US, smaller cars, better land use, better carbon intensity of construction/manufacturing are all feasible, but the visible first two are basically in conflict with median suburban lifestyle. Many normal people with good environmentally positive sympathies want their own cars and their own yards. Challenging to find a palatable way to say and to hear "round down." Maybe household solar (not everywhere, but common lots of places-- but not Florida!) is an example of that kind of positive change? Or the increase in newly-built local pockets of high density-- basically weakening the grip of car culture. There's this:
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/coal/use-of-coal.php#:~:text=In%202021%2C%20about%20546%20million,of%20total%20U.S.%20energy%20consumption.
I may rail against suburbia, but suburban lifestyle and feel is completely compatible with climate action - it just needs to be a bit tighter and closer to transit. It's not "everyone needs to live in a high-rise." An example of what a current American cul-de-sac suburb could morph into (page 13 of the large PDF).
I stand by the WWII analogy - part of it is that WWII was really really bad! -- but I don't think expanding the analogy any level down will be fruitful.
Those suburbs look like larger versions of my own neighborhood, which I consider very urban and densely packed.
21. Tenerife is also on fire, probably close to directly opposite Maui on the globe.
Taking comfort in the prospect of the human species surviving is brutal cynicism. Large areas of the world which currently support substantial populations will become uninhabitable, and we can already see what the response of the governments in rich nations is likely to be.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, I agree with ajay and Minivet here. Things are very bad right now and are likely to be as bad or worse for a while, but the level of warming we're currently experiencing was pretty much baked in (so to speak) 15-20 years ago. We really, really should have done more then to prevent it, as we see now, but there's plenty we can do and are doing to keep it from getting worse. These phenomena don't really exhibit "tipping-point" behavior; things can get worse but there's not really a "point of no return." We have made a lot of progress in recent years and are well positioned to make more.
Taking comfort in the prospect of the human species surviving is brutal cynicism.
I wouldn't be advocating in this vein if "humanity is totally doomed" wasn't becoming so prevalent a notion.
Perhaps with climate change we are today in the place we were with manure pollution in major cities in 1890, and smog pollution in industrial cities around 1970: There's a huge problem, it's worse in the thrid world but quite bad in the U.S. sickening lots of people and killing some of them, and there's not even a theoretical solution short of catastrophically shutting down the economy, which isn't going to happen. The Maui fire is comparabale to the Cuyahoga River catching fire. or the deadly smogs that afflicted London around that itme and don't any more.
I still think that a warming world is net positive for the U.S., since we have lots of acreage currently too cold for agriculture (mainly in Alaska), and relatively little that is too hot, in fact very little that is warm enough to grow tropical tree crops.
And air conditioning is extraordinarily successful in improving mortality and health effects generally due to excesssive heat--this is the hottest year ever, and there are almost no excess deaths in the U.S. from heat effects, unlike the U.S. 40 years ago, or Europe this year.
I just want to keep my self-image of being very urban while still keeping my patio, the trees, and my off-street parking.
The Maui fire is comparabale to the Cuyahoga River catching fire. or the deadly smogs that afflicted London around that itme and don't any more.
I was just thinking about the Cuyahoga versus Maui fires, in terms of whether the environmental movement has made progress. It has! We no longer have rivers catching fire. Still a lot of bad fires on land, and more as the climate warms, but we really have fixed some problems. Also, as I mentioned in a recent thread, we saved the whales. Progress is possible!
Progress isn't inevitable, and it takes a huge amount of hard and often frustrating work. But it is possible.
Yeah, the problem with climate change is that it takes such a long time to reverse what's already done, but we are making real progress.
I wouldn't be advocating in this vein if "humanity is totally doomed" wasn't becoming so prevalent a notion.
Does anyone say this and mean it completely literally? If I say it, I just mean "ack, widespread suffering and death and extinction!"
I'm the Cathy Guisewite of climate change. Ack!
At my brother's graduation from University of Michigan, they were going to have Kevorkian speak. But then he was deemed too controversial, and so they got Cathy Guisewite instead. Ack! A few years later, from the same institution, mine was Kofi Anon.
Is Guisewhite one of the Mason family?
37: Did you listen to what's her name's podcast about Cathy? I quit after the first few episodes.
40: Sorry, that's rude. Her name is Jamie Loftus.
I'm enjoying the unchecked optimism in this thread, but this is redonkulous:
I still think that a warming world is net positive for the U.S., since we have lots of acreage currently too cold for agriculture (mainly in Alaska), and relatively little that is too hot, in fact very little that is warm enough to grow tropical tree crops.
41: Her written piece about malls was great, but when I've tried to listen to some of her stuff, I can't get into it.
43: Yes, I also started her podcast about Mensa and her podcast about Spiritualism, and each time I quit after a couple of episodes.
"But still, the mass indifference that I see is a big source of my anxiety."
But see the Solnit article. Most people are not indifferent! We have actual opinion polls! People really do take it seriously.
The net positive argument is false because it ignores the truly massive adjustment costs from eg losing Miami. If we had a clean-slate choice then maybe but we are starting from the current position.
45.3: Also, animals and plants may have a hard time adjusting. Also there's the problems caused by many other parts of the world becoming uninhabitable.
Fuck losing Miami. We're on track to lose Bangladesh.
47: no. We are not on that track.
"Sea levels in Bangladesh are predicted to rise by up to 0.30 metres by 2050, resulting in the displacement of 0.9 million people, and by up to 0.74 metres by 2100, resulting in the displacement of 2.1 million people"
That is bad! But it is out of a population of 170 million. When you say things like "we are on track to lose Bangladesh", you are making up something to be nihilistic about. Don't do that.
Technically, if you're British, you've already lost Bangladesh. Also, if you're Indian. Also, if you're Pakistani. That's lots of people.
45: I like the article, but this is weak reassurance: "Nearly seven-in-ten Americans (69%) favor the U.S. taking steps to become carbon neutral by 2050"
Sure. Corporations that benefit from the status quo don't show up in a poll.
Also, everyone wants free preK and free healthcare, until the discussion gets close enough for the Republican noise machine to start squawking about death panels and lightbulbs. That remaining 30% is really hellbent on sabotaging things.
At the local level, climate change seems to be outpacing public will to change. But again, that's not something I can really measure, and maybe I live in one of these expendable places, idk.
7: Strongly advise not learning anything about the prior extinction events for which we have good evidence if you want to retain your, from my perspective, irrational optimism. Little by little, then all at once is not an unprecedented development. Civilization, as we know it, could not, flatly, not survive a 95%+ reduction in biodiversity and we are more than flirting with that outcome.
"Corporations that benefit from the status quo don't show up in a poll."
No, because they don't vote.
And 69% of Americans being for something doesn't give me a lot of hope that that something *won't* happen. And that number is only going to grow as the years pass and the deniers die.
Does anyone say this and mean it completely literally?
Completely literally? Probably not. Mostly literally, in the sense things will forever be worse and worse? Probably many do. And then there's the 51 perspective, which I can't rule out but we'll see.
51: good for a first try, but I'm not very easy to patronise. I think you might be better off sticking to simple abuse.
For what it's worth: my despair is not that we lack the technical capability or even the public interest in mitigation. It's that the wealthy stakeholders who exercise a bloody veto over the rest of us do not perceive it in their interests to allow it, that our political systems are so thoroughly corrupted and anemic that they are obstacles to overcome, not tools of rational change. We're still talking about, at best, reducing the rate at which we're making the situation worse!
Technically, if you're British, you've already lost Bangladesh.
TOO SOON, DUDE.
Maybe a nice boating trip would relax you?
"It's that the wealthy stakeholders who exercise a bloody veto over the rest of us do not perceive it in their interests to allow it"
They won't allow it, any more than they allowed Clean Air Acts or acid rain abatement measures or mandatory CFC replacement or water quality laws or lead-free petrol or emission control zones or renewable energy subsidies or fusion research or large scale battery storage or EV subsidies or bans on new ICE vehicles or fishing catch limits. None of those things happened and none of them will ever happen because the shadowy plutocrats will never allow them.
58: If you don't want comments you perceive as patronizing directed at you, I would encourage you to consider your own conduct.
Pretending that your comment is in any way civil and earnest: you might be surprised to learn that the NAM was not, in fact, an enthusiastic proponent of a ban on CFCs.
And yet it happened, didn't it? Which proves my point.
You're really not very good at this.
54 you'll want Mr. Barnard, room 12.
60: I would encourage you to re-read my comment with a little bit more care, but I don't really give a shit what you think.
Some weird stuff in this thread. Here are things that I think:
--The dominant fears regarding climate change are not about human extinction or the collapse of civilization. But small-percentage risks in that regard are still appropriately regarded with dread.
--the fact that uptake of solar/wind has surpassed expectations is good! But insufficient.
--I find ajay's optimism unjustified in some cases, and peculiar in others, to wit:
--climate optimism that includes the submergence of Miami (for instance) doesn't seem that optimistic to me
--a measure like "per capita emissions in every advanced country" isn't the relevant yardstick.
--the assertion that we are better off than if absolutely nothing good had happened is, again, a weird kind of optimism.
--We are accelerating less quickly toward a cliff, and that's impressive and good and nowhere near enough.
--I like Miami! I will be sad when it goes underwater.
Regarding "per capita emissions in every advanced country," that measure is entirely consistent with the ongoing increase of CO2 levels documented here.
I bought a used hat and got efficient windows, so I'm doing my part.
Do you need to tell your neighbor before you poison a gopher? The poison will be on my property, but the gopher will probably die below their deck.
Pushing back against extreme doomerism isn't as much of a straw man as some people in this thread are suggesting. There are definitely a lot of (mostly younger, mostly Very Online) people who really do seem to believe humans will literally go extinct in their lifetimes.
At the end of their lifetimes, I guess.
If you assume that Trump is the Antichrist, the world is probably ending regardless.
+1 for cautious optimism.
The risk of nonlinear climate change overtaking our ability to adapt remains but isn't something I feel able to understand.
The question re PRC green stats is an excellent one I really should have an answer for.
Re plutocracy, I think we're definitely past the point where there's as much money to be made from climate adaptation as from denial.
If we must have a war analogy (which of course we do, because we're people on the internet, and also people generally) I'd reach not for a single war but for the whole period of the Military Revolution, widely defined; in this analogy, 1945 was 1494.
I feel like a number of middles have been excluded a lot in this thread. Not feeling the gloom of near-impending oblivion is pollyannaish bright-eyed optimism. Not agreeing evil plutocrats will always stymie change is believing they are positive forces. etc.
The humane people say I should try to scare the gopher away but most of the things they suggest I can't do because it lives under my neighbor's deck.
73: Yeah, I hope I didn't contribute to that.
I also chuckled at 70.
69: As a person who was in his 20s in the 1980s and can remember members of my cohort expressing a belief that a nuclear holocaust would likely bring about the extinction of humanity in our lifetime, I tend to see this more as an expression of youthful angst than as a sober assessment of the likely affects of global warming. But I guess they could be right this time.
78: Behold the magic of compound interest.
--climate optimism that includes the submergence of Miami (for instance) doesn't seem that optimistic to me
Well, that depends on your feelings about Miami.
I think that a lot of bad things are going to happen, and many could have been avoided with more action earlier, and this is a cause for severe gloom. But there is a big difference between the most likely scenarios now and the most likely scenarios ten or twenty years ago, because action to reduce the damage has been happening, and a lot more of it than we thought would happen. This is a cause for optimism.
We are certainly not going to be poorer in 2100 than we are today. In the IPCC's worst-case scenario, the world will be twice as rich, per capita, as today. In their median scenario, per capita income for the world will be around $50,000 - roughly the same as Canada or the Netherlands today. That is a huge amount of extra productive capacity for remediation and resilience. Cause for optimism. (If we thought the world was going to get poorer, then it would be reasonable to assume we'd have a harder time dealing with the costs of climate change. If !X would make you feel pessimistic, then X should make you feel optimistic, I think.)
I don't think that large companies are always a positive force for change in this or any other area. I'm sure some will try their hardest to slow down action against climate change, by, for example, funding anti-wind energy groups like the Renewable Energy Foundation. But they won't always succeed - as can be seen by the success of many, many environmental and product safety laws in the past, all of which cost money to the companies that were manufacturing the dirty or dangerous products.
77 is a good point too - people have a tendency, I think, to get all "Waiting for the Barbarians" about this. At least when it's Game Over you can stop worrying about the game. But it's never going to be Game Over. We're just going to have to keep pressing buttons and wiggling joysticks for the rest of our lives and then the kids are going to have to do the same. I think some people actually find that a more depressing prospect than being swept away in the righteous anger of nature.
We're not going to be the Special Generation that destroyed the world. There aren't going to be post-technology cults in the ruins of Manhattan devoted to execrating our memories. We're just another age group that did some good stuff and some bad stuff.
Well, that depends on your feelings about Miami.
I think that's right.
When I was a kid, there was this thing they called "conservatism." And if you were a conservative and you had intellectual pretensions, you would say things like, "I'm not opposed to helping poor people or seeking full employment or seeing to it that four-year-olds get cancer treatment or controlling environmental carcinogens. But it's dangerous to monkey around with complex systems. Unintended consequences are inevitable. Best to just let things play out naturally."
The bit about unintended consequences, even though it was bullshit, was true. (We've all read Frankfurt's "On Bullshit," right?) Now the idiot children of those conservatives will say things like, "We ought not change the trajectory of CO2 production because hey, maybe warming is a good thing."
But it really is a bad idea screwing around with complex systems. Maybe warming will only kill millions, wreak geopolitical havoc, wipe out species, submerge coastal areas, hinder economic growth, and worsen weather conditions. But it's a real possibility that we won't get off so easy. Ignoring tail risk is going to catch up with us someday.
I am likewise one of those people who is still concerned about the possibility of a nuclear holocaust, and think that the worries of my youth in that regard were not at all naive. So you know, I'm kind of a leftist nut that way.
The total death of any conservative tradition outside of old white people complaining about their gas costing too much is not helpful. It's not the biggest problem, but it's a problem.
84: The conservative tradition of complaining about black people hasn't lost any of its vigor.
85: THE SEXUAL BEHAVIOR OF YOUNG PEOPLE IS A DISGRACE.
The worst part was I was young people right when AIDS was the biggest problem.
86 True, apparently they aren't having much and they abhor sex scenes in movies.
88: No one is talking about it, but from what I've seen, they are all having sex in robotaxis.
Vaguely related to climate, Robot Dad and a few people he was hiking with at the time got within a few hundred yards of summiting Katahdin and had to turn back due to weather. He's decided to call off his thru-hike (he was flip-flopping the AT), having completed something like 900 of 2200 miles in 5 months. The NE has just been far too rainy this year, and fording high and fast streams and hiking up mountains in gusting rains just doesn't make a lot of sense for a seventy-year-old who isn't a complete novice but could still use some more practice.
I'm super proud of him (both for what he's accomplished and for knowing when to stop before getting seriously injured) but I also kind of wish the timing was more convenient than a week and a half before the start of my semester. He'll be staying with us, at least initially, while he looks into buying a house here, hiring movers to get his stuff out of storage down in FL, and arranging to pick his car up from my sister's house several states away. He's either going to have to get moving pretty quickly on the car front or get comfortable driving mine and giving me rides to work because there is just no way I'm going to have the energy to chauffeur him around. I also get pretty irritable when I'm stressed, and it's irritating to suppress that irritation, so we'll see how long it takes for me to gently push him toward an extended stay hotel.
I'm sorry he wasn't able to finish, but 900 miles is great. I can't seem to get out even to do a 70 mile trail this year.
69: Teen me had a vague sense that nuclear war between the superpowers had a high probability of happening before I was terribly far into adulthood. And yet here we are. (Also, too, nobody, but really *nobody* expected that Communism would vanish as a global force, and that it would happen mostly peacefully.)
So I'm not surprised about the younger and the Very Online worrying about literal extinction, but this, too, has happened before.
Last night I went to hear a talk with a scientist from JPL, who has been running simulations to try to estimate the likelihood of other intelligent life in the galaxy. He concluded that it was vanishingly unlikely that we'd ever contact any intelligent extraterrestrials, because the window of opportunity was so small -- the models (based off of human evolution and behavior) showed that while it took millions of years for intelligent life forms to evolve, they all self destructed within a matter of hundreds of years. So that's fun.
So, we're running way ahead of estimates. Go us.
94: That seems kind of pseudoscientific. They have models showing how long it takes an intelligent species to self-destruct, typically, based on their observations of one intelligent species that hasn't self-destructed yet?
Which has lasted thousands of years.
Teen me had a vague sense that nuclear war between the superpowers had a high probability of happening before I was terribly far into adulthood. And yet here we are.
My dad has a similar story, where it was 1965 and he thought to himself, "Pot will definitely be legal in five years."
He told me that story in 1995, to make the same sort of point you're making.
I don't actually have an opinion on the likelihood of nuclear war. It always feels a little like Shrodinger's Cat to me somehow.
96: No, they measured the size of the windows of contact and then worked backwards to derive the implosion of the intelligent life forms.
99: This is what we call in the business "burying the lede."
Hurricane hitting Baja and southern California for the first time since 1939 isn't helping the WWII analogy.
The whole "Are We Alone" thing seems to mostly overlook what seems to me to be the key question: How does life develop in the first place? After you get that original cell, you can kinda see how, on occasion, you can get multicellular life. And then consciousness could plausibly arise in a subset of worlds with multicellular life. And survival over millions of years for a conscious species could be a thing that happens to a subset of that group.
But I haven't heard of a plausible explanation for how that first cell develops. Just a lot of hand-wavy amino acids in a puddle struck by lightning, or whatever. On a trillion habitable planets, given a few billion years, is there reason to suppose that's likely to happen even once? How is it that with our own consciousness and tools, we haven't been able to replicate the process?
I predict: No evidence of life will be found in the solar system. No fossilized cells on Mars; no prokaryotes on Europa.
101: I was curious about that. I thought hurricanes were supposed to be in the Atlantic.
Apparently, there are typhoons and there are Pacific hurricanes.
For one thing, Hurricanes can start in one ocean and end up in the other! The most ambitious crossover events.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Atlantic-Pacific_crossover_hurricanes
The do, however, get two different names when they do that. Which is how you get Hurricane Fifi-Orlene.
I think it's somewhat less despair-inducing to focus on local questions, at least some of the time. We need to make sure the Great Salt Lake doesn't turn into a toxic dustbowl, but the governor has alfalfa farms that depend on flood irrigation, so the political will is about praying for rain (and the epic snowpack this year bought us about two years.) But -- we can xeriscape our front yard, and use less water, and none of it will matter without big political action, but those at least have tangible benefits.
94: this is just the Great Filter hypothesis with a computer simulation, no?
I've seen arguments that life must be easy to start because it seems to have started very quickly on earth, pretty much as soon as the earth cooled. Eukaryotic life OTOH took billions of years. That may be the tricky bit.
I think The Great Filter is how Dune ends.
No, that's how you make Great Coffee.
This was on the periphery of research I did in grad school, which touched on what kinds of macromolecules can self- replicate. There are several steps with different levels of understanding-
- Making the necessary organic building blocks from inorganic precursors- has been demonstrated in various forms.
- Introduction of chirality- a number of interesting hypotheses including magnetic fields recently. Don't think everyone agrees on the mechanism but it seems feasible.
- Assembly of self-replicating polymers- mostly theoretical. I don't think anyone's demonstrated a definitive method by which this happens, but it's been shown that a number of polymers might be able to self-replicate once you've formed a large enough sampling of them.
- Encapsulation of self replicating molecules into proto-cells- not sure about what's been studied here.
- Development of consciousness- are we sure that's even really happened?
You can only tell on planets where there are street signs.
111: Whereas you fake Great Coffee with a java emulator.
I'm kinda of two minds: I'm old enough that when I was in school, exoplanets were entirely theoretical from humanity's point of view. Now we feel confident in having identified more than 5,000 of them. Far from being rare, planets are all over the place. The parallels with life are pretty obvious, though as an analogy probably banned. Still, there's good reason to think that once we have the tools to detect signatures of life in other systems, we'll find a bunch of it.
On the other hand, life on Earth seems to have needed so many special conditions and odd bits that it's almost infinitely improbable. The planet has to be of a certain size, a certain distance from its star, has to have enough of an atmosphere to protect life from radiation but not so much of one that it's subject to crushing pressure, seasons and plate tectonics to spur the changes necessary for evolution, and just on and on. That would seem to place constraints on life in general, while our ever-expanding sphere (assume spherical life) of unanswered radio emissions argues against extraterrestrial civilization anywhere nearby.
On the other other hand, life keeps turning up in even the most hostile environments on Earth, so once it gets started it seems to be tenacious. Back to there being a bunch of life if only we can peer closely enough.
Anyway, most days I think there's a bunch of life out there, but not a civilization close enough in space and time for humanity to make contact.
I saw on the internet that the government has proof of aliens but I ignored it because it was a Republican-led House hearing.
I think it's just really hard to know anything about this topic because:
1) We know absolutely nothing about where and how life first appeared on earth.
2) We have no idea whether other promising locations within the solar system, like the moons of Europa and Enceledus, have life.
In particular, I think we know next to nothing about how many special conditions are needed for life. The main thing we know is that life is not present or extremely rare on Mars, which does tell you something, but not a hell of a lot.
Hell, we know very little about life in the Atacama desert, and the instruments we sent to Mars struggle to detect life there:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2023/02/21/mars-life-atacama-microbiome/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9944251/
So we really shouldn't even be *that* confident Mars doesn't have life.
It's life, Jim, but not as we know it.
There have been a few abrupt methane plumes detected on Mars, Curiosity rover in Gale crater 2019, as well as localized emissions in Martian summer seen by satellite earlier. Not dispositive and not impossible that they're somehow geologic, but definitely a place to dig when we can do that later.
119: boldly going forward cuz we can't find reverse!
115: ISTR a SETI study found our RF emissions would be indistinguishable from background noise more than 2 light years away, or something similar.
What if we broadcast nothing but "Under Pressure" for five years?
There have been a few abrupt methane plumes detected on Mars
Maybe Musk has been there already?
101: Hurricane hitting Baja and southern California for the first time since 1939 isn't helping the WWII analogy.
I'm in LA right now for a wedding. It is Saturday so should be done before things deteriorate. But people worried about flying out. (Current track has it going inland further south but still a lot of rain and some possible wind--a potential "wet" Santa Ana per one NWS discussion.)
But *I* am not going to the wedding as I just came down with Covid for the first tine. Somewhat sick--low fever, aches, congestion, but not too bad. But it complicated things as we were staying in airBnB with the parents of the groom plus I was at a pre-wedding event the night before. Sigh. At least the place had separate small guest house which is now my prison quarantine quarters. Did mask on plane coming here but ...
I'm sorry. That's not good. But everyone I know who hadn't had covid yet, got it in the past five weeks or so. For me the coughing was the worst part of it. I was barely sick except that I couldn't not cough.
Ugh, stupid covid. There's a real upswing happening right now for the first time this year. I was hoping things would actually stay low for a little while.
How much do Mormons today make of the GSL-Dead Sea parallel?
126, 127: One possible sign of an uptick here is that it is being quite hard to locate self-test kits. We all came prepared with our own, but places are out.
Re: life on other planets, just to make it a little more complicated, what are the conditions for developing space-faring technology? When people talk about UFOs or whatever the new abbreviation is, they aren't thinking about protozoa, they're thinking about things that make tools as useful as ours, or really, more useful, since we haven't even got to another star yet. Earth has had life for billions of years and had technology for thousands of years, and even that is with a broad use of "technology". Personally I'd guess there's a lot of life out there, but not a lot of space-faring life.
Re: 125 et al.: sorry, JP. Cassandane just got covid for the first time 10 days ago. (So, today is the day we're probably going to stop wearing masks around the house.) The kid and I have still never tested positive, despite 7 tests between us in the past 9 and a half days and god knows how many before. I'm amazed.
Also, is it just local or is there an intensified plague of Disney-branded crap right now?
Branded with actual "Disney" or Disney-movie stuff like Elsa and whatever?
Both but especially Disney itself. Mickey mouse etc.
That's just you. Half of the people here are attacking Disney for being only greedy instead of greedy and racist.
Anyway, I'm feeling a little pro-Disney because The Mandolorian is pretty much the only new TV show that I've enjoyed in maybe 15 years.
I haven't seen the Mandalorian but have seen Andor and it's definitely better.
My wife got it for the firth time a couple of weeks ago. First time we know of, anyway.
The firth time is the deepest.
First.
She blames the International Choral Festival -- a young cousin from Germany participated and stayed with us (and maybe got it too, but no one thought to test) -- but that's at least 50% due to her conviction that all non-essential trans-oceanic air travel should be discontinued for climate reasons.
Fortunately, the airlines and other passengers are making things so shitty that I'm pretty sure they must be secret climate activists. Only the flight attendants are still trying to keep the planes usable.
Anyway, my daughter and granddaughter are in San Diego, wrapping up a week of the latter's visitation with her dad. They're flying home Monday. It looks like the storm might be a more little inland than thought yesterday, but as we know from living in the East, hurricanes aren't quite as predictable as everyone assumes. In any event, there's going to be a ton of rain, and a whole lot of dirty water flowing out into the ocean from both San Diego and Tijuana. We were down for Xmas a few years back, and there was quite a bit of flooding in the US parts of the Tijuana River estuary,
I'm saving Andor for fall. I feel more like watching TV when it's cold.
Tracking shows the storm getting to Idaho. If we still had a president who knew how to use a sharpie, we'd probably be in the path. And could look forward to seeing a good bit of rain fall on some burning trees.
Andor is so good. I do also love Mando, especially season 1, but they're very different. The Mandalorian at its best is a throwback old-school episodic TV almost procedural. Deeply enjoyable but not aiming to do too much.
It was quite a trip to watch Andor after having recently gone on the tour at Cruachan!
Mandolorian is Gunsmoke in space with Baby Yoda as Festus.
I really hope episodic TV can make a comeback. Mando and Poker Face are a good start.
Speaking of covid, I've been complaining that the supply chain has screwed up the lettuce so that nearly all of it tastes bitter. It just occurred to me that what probably happened is that covid did hit my sense of taste, but not in a very big way.
||
Some journalist thought she was doing her influencer friend a favor by writing a profile of her. Maybe it'll help her get new brand affiliations.
I don't know who exactly the intended audience is for this, but it's certainly not any of the Montana folks I've seen linking and commenting on it.
The influencer does understand that in a place where everyone is like two degrees of separation from everyone else you have to behave accordingly, but her friend the journalist doesn't seem to get that the article isn't going to help her. I guess, though, that it's clear enough that she thinks Montanans are smart enough to read, so no danger there.
|>
Are *not* smart enough to read. See!
148: that does not seem likely to endear her to people.
I just want to note that she's not from NYC either.
I assumed California and was gratified when I looked.
Is the show Andor related to the book And/or?
I'm thinking of Either/Or. So probably not.
Is it at least about binary operations?
It's the northern kingdom of the Dúnedain.
It's either the northern kingdom of Dunedain, or...
125: My daughter is doing an unfogged-worthy job of live-blogging (well live-texting) the wedding I am missing due to covid. I was unsparing in my insistence that she do so and she has delivered.
Actually, it was Andolf the Gray's monster
The dumb thread was worried that Moby and heebie were somehow making fun of her.
The dumb thread has a local political blog, and found out yesterday that someone has guessed their identity.
I was very prepared for this to happen, and was kinda surprised that it took as long as it did. The person who guessed was someone I interacted with very closely when I was on the local planning commission, and so it makes 100% sense that he figured it out.
My unchecked expectation, it turns out, was that I assumed that if someone guessed, they'd reach out to me and say, "Am I right? Is it you?" But this guy did not. Instead he told another other people, one of whom bumped into me at a taco truck last night and verified. (I'd long since decided that if anyone asked me point blank, I wouldn't lie.) It turns out that I'm slightly rattled by the idea that people have known and I haven't known they've known.
If it makes you feel better, they have to live with knowing they are lame.
He's mostly NIMBY. I generally like him interpersonally, though. He had to read about me accusing him of fighting the battles of 2010 in the year 2023. But I had an advantage because I was able to quote him saying, "I joined this commission after all the [local issues] of the 2000s, and you know what? Those problems never got solved and we're still fighting the same battles!" But I made him look a little dumb, I think.
The violin lady was better even though she didn't know you for real.
God, she really was the best. I stil feel a little bad.
163: I'd long since decided that if anyone asked me point blank, I wouldn't lie.
I was not happy that at the request of the bride and groom (my nephew) no one was to tell anyone that I was not there due to Covid. It probably worked as his side was ~10% of the guests and all already knew. But I thought it was pretty fucked up. I hope they were at least smart enough to include the mother of the bride as a co-conspirator as she was clearly someone who cared a whole fuck of a lot about fucking everything. (In fact I'm sure they did and she probably came up with the strategy.)
167: I stil feel a little bad
So do I, but not enough that I don't crave an update.
169: I'm speculating so probably shouldn't jump to conclusions. Wife and daughter more potentially in the hot sest because they sre there. I'm just back here being snarky in my pretty luxurious isolation ward..,
In conclusion:
"I wanna do right but not right now."
-- Gillian Welch
https://www.google.com/search?q=wanna+do+right+but+not+right+now&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en-us&client=safari#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:719bf11c,vid:B8aH4cRdplE
Oops, actual link
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8aH4cRdplE
(I can't seem to embed links straightforwardly on my iPhone anymore, I think it tries to be "smart" and changes the quote marks to different characters and blows the tag. There may be agrungy workaround but to much work to figure it out.
I was not happy that at the request of the bride and groom (my nephew) no one was to tell anyone that I was not there due to Covid.
I can't imagine why anyone would want to keep this fact a secret. What on earth is wrong with a conversation like "Oh, it's a shame JP isn't here? Is he OK?" "No, he couldn't make it because he's got COVID. He's feeling a bit crap but he should be fine by next week." Did they have an alternative cover story to explain your absence or was it just "No, he isn't here"?
If it was syphilis, now, I could understand.
27: to me "densely packed" is Manhattan or parts of Chicago.
"Stormcrow's not here because he's fighting wildfires and the hurricane."
"He killed a guy in a bar fight last night. One punch. "
"Self defense, but turns out the guy was an off- duty cop. "
Rain slowly increasing in intensity in my part of LA. And from radar, more so further inland. But it also looks like it might a detached advance wave of moisture.
OT: I just bought a version of Red Vines made with natural stuff. The flavor was the same, pretty much, but the texture was off. And the color was way off.
174: I think it was more, no blot however small shall be allowed to diminish the glory of this wondrous event. And it is a bit more complicated as we were to attend the rehearsal dinner Friday evening despite not being in the wedding. Neither I nor my wife and daughter attended. They tested (negative) right before leaving for the actual wedding on Saturday. A family-eyes-only photo shows them swabbing noses in their wedding finery (covid guy available to snap pics since we were using ample outdoor living space in sun-drenched LA in August...)
In the event no fibs needed from them as they only really interacted with groom-side folks who all seemed to know and asked after my condition (which is pretty good actually).
BUT, upon waking this AM daughter absolutely sure she has it, and wife pretty sure. But negative tests yet again. I suspect they do have it and our timing probably impeccable:
Me: exposed on travel day then 2+ days until symptoms, just long enough to be at party while contagious but not symptomatic.
Wife & daughter: probably exposed on day of party driving around and doing stuff with me, then 2+ days until symptoms, just long enough to be at wedding ceremony & reception while contagious but not symptomatic.
In conclusion: There will be covid at the wedding. It is best if the covid is discovered after the wedding.
"Dearly beloved, we are gathered here to celebrate the union of spike proteins and ..."
148: I think you can basically buy your way into Business Insider publication.
148: I think you can basically buy your way into Business Insider publication.
Rapid tests have been pretty useless for years (not sure if it's Omicron or vaccination that is the problem, I think probably the latter?).
Think false positives are still pretty rare but as a reliable All Clear signal they are mostly crap. Prudence certainly would have dictated no attendance yesterday.
But no worries, lots of great things to do outdoors in Southern California in the summertime.
But no worries, lots of great things to do outdoors in Southern California in the summertime.
Canoeing, kayaking, mud wrestling, etc.
I do recall reading an article once years ago about crazies who would kayak various channels that drained surrounding mountains.
And just felt an earthquake (very minor shake here); 5.1 -50 miles NW near Ojai.
You might be bad luck for Califonia.
there was a thorough outbreak of covid after a well-attended friday night shindig at the swim club a couple of weeks ago (i did not attend), & from the descriptions of many people's exposure to the infectious person it seems the current version in sf is absurdly contagious. brief conversations outdoors apparently did the trick, although in a crowd so likely shouty.
i'm back to outdoor showers post swim & skipping the sauna. works fine this time of year but in the winter it takes a bit more self control to forego all that toasty warmth! our hills come in handy for post swim rewarming bike rides.
still going into the office a couple of days a week but it seems kind of dumb how everyone is pretending covid is no longer a thing.
Swimmers shout at parties because of water in their ears.
sf bay swimmers shout bc they have mack's earplugs very firmly & well sealed in their ears in an effort to avoid surfer's ear & the consequent surprisingly medieval surgery.
This covid upswing is kinda weird, it doesn't really seem to be driven by a new variant. (There is a major variant recently detected, but the timing isn't right for it to have caused the upswing.) Bit of a mystery to me. Could be some seasonal effect? Or maybe just that it's been long enough from the initial vaccinations and the first Omicron wave that immunity has waned?
I think it's because I typed here that I'm immune to covid and will never get my comeuppance for announcing that I was immune to covid.
OT: If trying to economize, buying Crémant de Bourgogne instead of a sparkling white from Napa is not a good way to save money.
Never mind. It's fine after the second glass.
Uh, 199 suggests that lourdes and I have been living our lives super wrong without realizing it. (I guess I wouldn't say no to a good sparkling white from Napa.)
Anyway, people have their own taste things.
190: You could definitely kayak the Los Angeles River and many of its tributaries starting pretty far inland right now. You might not survive but your kayak would not have a problem floating until maybe after a collision.
Has anyone read anything good on the US nuclear testing program?
Meanwhile, in Yakutia:
https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2023/08/07/nearly-100-wildfires-blazing-across-russias-republic-of-sakha-a82080
It's nice that Texas can point to someone worse.
the traffic noise and the field personnel jumping were used as surface wave energy for refraction microtremor analysis
I wonder if it would be possible to create support for foreign aid that goes to actual poor people by arguing that it reduces immigration?
I think your VP is trying that. Call her?
212 read the story earlier in the NYT, the details were horrific. I didn't think I could hate the Saudis more but here we are.
No structure razed against law, demolitions not remotely case of ethnic cleansing: Haryana govt
So that's all right then.
https://thechinaproject.com/2023/08/17/hikvision-still-sells-uyghur-tracking-surveillance-cameras-and-they-use-nvidia-chips/
Also, a dog bit someone.
I now have California COVID hospitalizations loading to a file where I can just hit "Refresh" and the graph re-downloads the CDPH table and updates all the charts.
They went back to daily reporting after an abortive attempt at weekly when the data got all wonky and incomparable, but they don't update nearly as often. The most recent date reported is Aug. 12, at which point the statewide total hospitalized had risen from a low of 607 to 1,051. But that's still really low historically - the low point in July 2021 about 1,200, same in April 2022, higher in the Oct. 2022 trough. So if you start with the all-time graph you have to really zoom in and expand the y-axis for the increase to be noticeable.
Also, it looked like the Bay might have been levelling off.
But who knows what's next. Hospitalizations are of course a lagging indicator. "Cases" is now so unreliable an indicator it's not released. The wastewater dashboards (last data Aug. 15) for SF and EBMUD also seem to perhaps have peaked, but San Jose is on the up.
So widespread is the bankruptcy among charcoal burners and traders that they have resorted to cutting down the famous shea-butter trees, he said. These trees are believed to have the potential to enhance nutrition and augment food supplies during the annual hungry season in northern Uganda.
OT Bleg: I have a lot of weird email anxiety, so help me with this problem. I need to email three people about collaborating on a project. [Background: I reached out to a fourth person about this and he told me to email these three people instead]. I know one of the people but not the other two. At first I was planning on emailing them separately and writing a more personalized email to the one person I know and copying the more boilerplate email for the other two. Then I realized that might be weird and maybe I should just send a group email? But I don't know how to do the tone, I need to introduce myself professionally to the two but that might come off as weirdly strange and formal to the person I do know. Also...I'm asking them about interest taking on a new project (i.e. work) and it might be awkward to say no in a conversation with colleagues as opposed to a private email.
COMPLICATIONS: I am a white person and the project involves working with non-white communities of which my colleagues are members. This is in my academic wheelhouse but I'm relatively new and don't want to look like I'm spearheading a project by steamrolling or ignoring colleagues with more institutional knowledge who are also community members.
I have a somewhat weird history with the person I do know. For a year this person avoided me and got an investigation initiated against me because of defamatory comments made to them by my batshit insane and evil advisor. (I don't blame them at all for their role in the whole mess as they were acting responsibly on what they believed to be reliable information.) That got cleared up a few years ago and while we've never spoken about it, this person has been ostentatiously friendly to me in all interactions, which I have interpreted as their way of making amends. But anyways, I still feel a little on edge around them and don't want to commit a social faux pas.
225: I would write a group e-mail to all three (and possibly a second, shorter note to the person you already know). I don't know of any way to make it non-awkward, but I would make it as straightforward as possible and maybe you can frame it as, "I am interested in finding collaborators for the following project. I hope you might be interested, and please let me know if there are other people I should be contacting." I don't know the exact circumstance but that might both give them a polite way to decline, "I can't do it, but you should talk to X they might know somebody" and also give them a way to respond if you come across as pushy ("I think Y has already been working on something similar; you should check with them to see what they're doing.")
You might consider giving all three individual phone calls or voicemails before the big email, introducing the topic so it feels like a more personal request, noting who the other two are, and saying "Of course the real details will be in the email and subsequent discussions, I'm not looking for a yes before you know everything you need to."
Seconding 227.
"Dear A, B, and C,
I am beginning work on Project X and wanted to see if any or all of you would be interested in collaborating with me. A and I know one another, of course, and person Y suggested to me that I reach out to B and C on this as well. Etc."
"P.S. I am not a racist, as B knows from past experience."
229 seems right to me. There are all kinds of variables here, but I think you want to answer the question: "Why are you contacting me?" And if it's appropriate, talking specifically about the referral would help.
But (again depending on the specifics of the situation) I wouldn't send an email to all three at this stage -- unless their participation is dependent on the participation of the other two. The original option from La Presidentessa seems like the correct one to me:
At first I was planning on emailing them separately and writing a more personalized email to the one person I know and copying the more boilerplate email for the other two.
Also: ever since Get Out you always want to work into the conversation, "By the way, I would have voted for Obama for a third term if I could."
Oh hey. Arevalo won. Hopefully they don't shoot him. Write your critters to re-up CICIG.
I mean, if it's appropriate. You can talk specifically about this referral if it helps.
Thanks for the advice. If it makes a difference the recommender specifically mentioned that person I know (A) had expressed interest in starting this project in the past, and that I should also reach out to the other two (B, C) because the co-run a program that is relevant. In that case maybe I should just email A separately and email B & C together and note I'd been put in touch due to their roles directing a program.
234: Yes, that makes sense. You might also tell A that you plan to reach out to B & C.
I like 229 and i would approach all three at once, perhaps with a side note to the one with whom you have a history. The point of the email is likely just to set up a time to chat to pitch collaboration, right?
this person has been ostentatiously friendly to me in all interactions, which I have interpreted as their way of making amends.
"By the way, I would have voted for Clinton for a third term if I could."
I ended up emailing A separately and B & C together, letting everyone know I was emailing the other party. B wrote me back and CC'd A, saying he was very interested in my project and inviting me to be on the board of the program he co-directs. A responded to everyone saying they would be very happy to collaborate with me.
Anyways, thanks again for your help with my weird email neurosis. I think what I did was totally fine and emailing all three together also would have been completely fine.